How GitHub has taken over as the go to code repository for everyone, even Google, Microsoft, etc. So much so that Google shut down Google Code, and while Microsoft still has their Codeplex up and running as an alternative, they too post to GitHub as that’s where all the developers are.

The article is worth a read for how Git makes this possible. In the past, with Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCS) such as Subversion, the master copy of your code was with this central repository and so there was a fear of what would happen if that central repository went down. But with Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) there’s no fear of such a thing happening because your code lives locally on your machine too.

Channel 9 talks on DSC. A few weeks ago I had tried attending this Jeffrey Snover talk on PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) but I couldn’t because of bandwidth issues. Those talks are now online (been 5 days I think), here’s links to anyone interested:

I listen to the NPR TED Radio Hour podcast which presents TED talks in a radio format. The above talk is about maths, and is very interesting. Here are links to the actual TED talks. I hope to download and watch them later. (“hope” because it’s way easier listening to a podcast as you can do that when driving, walking, etc while with a video you have to set aside time and do only that!)

Came across this via Prismatic. Putting it here because this is something I was thinking of writing a blog post about myself.

Once upon a time I used to have Linux servers running Samba. Later I tried FreeBSD+ZFS and Samba. Lately I have been thinking of using FreeNAS. But each time I scrap all those attempts/ ideas and stick with running all my file shares over my Windows 8.1 desktop. Simply because they offer native NTFS support and that works best in my situation as all my clients are Windows and I have things set down the way I want with NTFS permissions etc.

Samba is great but if your clients are primarily Windows then it’s a hassle, I think. Better to stick with Windows on the server end too.

Another reason I wouldn’t go with a NAS solution is because I am then dependent on the NAS box. Sure it’s convenient and all, but if that box fails then I have to get a similar box just to read my data off the disks (assuming I can take out disks from one box and put into another). But with my current setup I have no such issues. I have a bunch of internal and external disks attached to my desktop PC; if that PC were to ever fail, I can easily plug these into any space PC/ laptop and everything’s accessible as before.

I don’t do anything fancy in terms of mirroring for redundancy either! I have a batch file that does a robocopy between the primary disk and its backup disk every night. This way if a disk fails I only lose the last 24 hours of data at most. And if I know I have added lots of data recently, I run the batch file manually just in case.

It’s good to keep an offsite backup too. For this reason I use CrashPlan to backup data offsite. That’s the backup to my backup. Just in case …

If I get a chance I want to convert some of my external disks to internal and/ or USB 3.0. That’s the only plan I currently have in mind for these.

CoreOS recently launched an alternative to the Docker container platform, called Rocket. It’s not a fork of Docker, it’s something new. The announcement got a lot of hype including some comments by the creator of Docker. In this podcast Alex talks on why he and Brandon (co-founder of CoreOS) created CoreOS – their focus was on security and an OS that automatically updated itself, for this they wanted all the applications and its dependencies to be in packages of its own independent of the core OS, Docker containers fit the bill, and so CoreOS decided to use Docker containers as the only applications it would run with CoreOS itself being a core OS that automatically updated. If they hadn’t come across Docker they might have invented something of their own.

CoreOS was happy with Docker but Docker now has plans of its own – not bad per se, just that they don’t fit with what CoreOS wanted from Docker. CoreOS was expecting Docker containers as a “component” to be still available, with new features from Docker added on to this base component, but Docker seems to be modifying the container approach itself to suit their needs. So CoreOS can’t use Docker containers the way they want to.

Added to that Docker is poor on security. The Docker daemon runs as root and listens on HTTP. Poor security practice. Downloads aren’t verified. There’s no standard defining what containers are. And there’s no way of easily discovering Docker containers. (So that’s three issues – (1) poor security, (2) no standard, and (3) poor discoverability). Rocket aims to fix these, and be a component (following the Unix philosophy of simple components that do one thing and do it well, working together to form something bigger). They don’t view Docker as a competition, as in their eyes Docker has now moved on to a lot more things.

I haven’t used Docker, CoreOS, or Rocket, but I am aware of them and read whatever I come across. This was an interesting podcast – thought I should point to it in case anyone else finds it interesting. Cheers!

Check out this episode of the Exponent podcast by Ben Thompson and James Allworth.

Ben Thompson is the author of the stratechery blog which is an amazing read for Ben’s insights into technology. James Allworth, I am not much aware of but he was terrific in the above episode. I began following this podcast recently and have only heard one episode prior to this (on Xaomi, again a great episode; in fact the one on copyrights and patents continues on a point mentioned in the Xaomi episode).

This episode was great for a couple of reasons. I felt Ben was caught out of element in the episode, which is unlike how I have read/ heard him previously where he is confident and authoritative. In this episode he was against abolishing copyrights – which is what James was advocating for – but he didn’t have convincing arguments. So he resorted to the usual arguing tricks like prop up examples and try to get the argument to be about the example (and when it still failed he would withdraw the example claiming it wasn’t appropriate here). Or he’d just take a firm stand and refuse to budge. Or incite James by insults and such. Or try and win by conflating the argument with something else which had no relation to it. Basically, usual debating tricks I believe, but it was fun to hear and I was surprised to hear him resorting to these.

Eventually when Ben clarified his point it made sense to me. His argument is that patents are harmful when they apply to “ingredients” (parts of an invention, e.g. pull to refresh) but he has no issues when it applies to a whole thing (e.g. medicine). Moreover, the question is whether the presence of the patent is required to spur invention (not required in the case of technology, required/ preferred in case of medicines) and whether society would be better off without the monopoly afforded by patents (again, no in the case of tech as it leads to barriers of enter and unnecessary patent wars and trolling for new inventions). Copyright, for Ben, is neither harmful to society nor will its absence spur more innovation, so he doesn’t see why it must be abolished. He seems to agree that copyright has its negatives and is harmful in some cases, but he still feels it is useful to make supply scarce (by preventing others from copying the work).

James agrees with most of these but his point is that the same effect can be arrived at without copyrights. Maybe by innovation in other areas, or by agreements between the creator and audience. His argument is more about considering a world without as an option, and to look at how things can be done differently. Moreover, such a world will lead to more creativity and he feels that’s better in the long run.

I can’t write more as I have a flight to catch, so I’ll end this post now. And it’s better to hear the arguments than my summary. Go check out the podcast. It’s a great one! Skip the first few minutes as it is some user feedback etc.

I use (and luuuuuv!) the excellent Pocket Casts podcasts app. I discovered it when I switched to the OnePlus One and it’s probably my number 1 used app on the phone. I have discovered so many new podcasts thanks to it (because it has a good discovery tab and also because I listen to more podcasts now so I try and discover new stuff).

I wouldn’t be too far from the truth in saying that one major reason why I am still with the OnePlus One rather than going back to my iPhone 5S is Pocket Casts. Not coz Pocket Casts isn’t available for iOS, but because the OnePlus One with its 64GB of storage lets me download tons of podcasts while my iPhone 5S is a measly 16GB and so I can’t download much stuff for offline use. Sure, the OnePlus One’s larger screen is good for reading, but I don’t do much reading on that nowadays. The OnePlus One has the advantage of 64GB storage and the ability to just copy movies and music to it via MTP, while the iPhone 5S has the disadvantage of low storage (in my case) and the inability to just copy stuff over it without iTunes. The iPhone 5S keyboard is way better though (I hate typing on the OnePlus One, even with custom keyboards like Flesky) and its camera is miles ahead of the OnePlus One too.

Anyways, I digress …

Pocket Casts is an amazing podcasts and you must check it out if you are into podcasts. Apart from a ton of great features, it also has sync. This means all my subscriptions on the OnePlus One will easily be in sync on the iPhone 5S too. More importantly, not just the subscriptions, but also my progress with each podcast. Isn’t that cool!

As if that wasn’t cool enough though, I discovered via the latest episode of All About Android (where one of the Pocket Casts developer was a guest) that they now have a web player version. W00t! You can view it at https://play.pocketcasts.com/ – as with the Android/ iOS apps it’s not free, there’s a one time purchase, but that’s fine in my opinion. Free doesn’t have a long term future so I am happy paying for apps & services as long as they are good and meet my needs. (Apparently the web player was released on their blog in October itself). The web player too syncs with the mobile apps.

A note about the sync: unlike Kindle syncing for books (which is what I am used to) the app/ web player does not prompt you that you are currently on a further location with another device. If you already have the podcast open and you click “play” it will continue from where you are. But if you re-open the episode it will continue from where you are on the other device.

Update: Some blog posts from Russell Ivanovic (one of the creators of Pocket Casts; he was the guest in the All About Android podcast). The first post was mentioned on the podcast so I checked out his blog:

p.s. I began using the iOS version of Pocket Casts the other day, and boy, is the Android version much better designed! Wow. This is the first app where I feel the Android version is much better designed than iOS. Most other apps have it the other way around. In the podcast Russell too mentioned something similar – that they are giving priority to Android over iOS nowadays.

Interesting talk by George Neville-Neil on FreeBSD and research. At Microsoft Cambridge, of all the places!

I am listening to two BSD podcasts nowadays – bsdtalk and BSD Now – and it’s been both great (coz I just love BSD!) and sad (coz I just love BSD and wish I were using them as actively as I was many years ago … sigh!). Came across the above talk via BSD Now, I listened to the audio version (you don’t really need the video version as it’s mostly talking and the slides are a separate download anyway and you can skip those). Earlier this week I listened to the bsdtalk interview with Mathew Dillon, founder of DragonFlyBSD. That was a great interview. I admire Matthew Dillon a lot and have listened to his previous interview (interviews?) on bsdtalk and elsewhere. Takes passion and vision and knowledge to stand by what you feel and fork an OS such as FreeBSD and actually get it going this far – I totally admire that! Sadly, DragonFlyBSD is the one I have least used – except briefly to check out HAMMER.